Russ McBee

I ran across these two quotes from Angela Davis, both of which bear remembering: First, on President Bush: When Bush says democracy, I often wonder what he's referring to. Then, dear Angela pretty much sums up our shallow culture's obsession with style over substance: It is both humiliating and humbling to discover that a single generation ...

The Bush administration's mismanagement of the Census Bureau is posing a threat to the integrity of the 2010 census. Among other problems, there's this: Lawmakers must also ensure that the final census funding bill includes a provision from the House version that would require the bureau to spend $8 million to $10 million of its budget on the ...

Those three words are among the traits sadly lacking in the Bush White House; today's New York Times editorial holds nothing back in speaking the truth so many Americans refuse to hear: There are too many moments these days when we cannot recognize our country. Sunday was one of them, as we read the account in The Times of how men in some of ...

Until recently, a woman named Chris Comer had served for nine years as the state science curriculum director for the Texas Education Agency. She was fired for forwarding an email and merely adding the phrase ''FYI.'' Unfortunately for Ms. Comer and the schoolchildren of Texas, the subject of the email was a presentation to be given by a ...

In 1999, Scott McNealy, the notoriously arrogant and self-absorbed chairman of Sun Microsystems, said, ''You have no privacy. Get over it.'' His profits come first. Your privacy is a remotely distant second. His greed trumps your rights; after all, he does represent a corporation, and we all know that corporate rights trump individual ...

One year ago today, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006. This malignant, perfidious law gives the president the authority to suspend habeas corpus for anyone he chooses. It also sanctifies the admissibility of evidence obtained through torture. For a full year now, our country has been deprived of one of its most ...

This article in today's NYT draws some interesting parallels between our national response to 9/11 and our collective response to Indian attacks in the 17th century. Although I think the author, Susan Faludi, may be overstating her case a bit, she makes some very good points about the mythos underlying many Americans' sense of themselves. The ...

The zeitgeist of the Bush years can be summed up by one unintentionally meta-critical sentence from the ABC News blog ''The Blotter'' (via HuffPo): The White House will not identify a private company which appears to be involved in the disappearance of millions of White House e-mails. Mull that sentence over for a while, then ask yourself why ...